Wednesday, January 6, 2016

There are more tears to shed, Mr. President

In the last days there will come times of difficulty. For people will become lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to parents, ungrateful, unholy, heartless,
unappeasable, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not loving good, treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having the appearance of godliness, but denying its power.  2 Timothy 3

I was struck, as I know all of us were, with the tears our President shed over the slayings of the Sandy Hook children by Adam Lanza in 2012. It was a heartless act. A young man driven by his own demons to destroy the lives of children and teachers...helpless, innocent, vulnerable, with no means of protection against the onslaught of bullets shot from the gun of a twenty-year old kid who'd just murdered his own mother. For all of us, the horror of it is fresh when we remember. How could this be? Where does this cold, calculated ability to take the lives of the innocent come from? Some deep well of hatred? Years of untreated mental turmoil? In the wake of the slaughter, the blood of the innocent cries out to us for change! Our President proposes we give up our guns. I know where this comes from. It was a gun in the hands of a troubled young man that left him dead, his lifeblood mixed with those he killed.

As I keep turning the news conference yesterday over and over in my mind, it is never the gun that kills. I know. I know. If the kid hadn't had one, he wouldn't have used it. But the why of Adam Lanza's need to blast into Sandy Hook to kill seems the bigger question than the method he used to quench the soul sickness that prodded him to his task that morning. And not just him at Sandy Hook, but of the several mass murders in the past seven years...more than any other decade stretching back to 1982 (incidents where four or more people were shot in a single event, FBI definition). Could it be that something is going horribly wrong with our hearts?

Since Roe v Wade passed in 1973, 57,762,169 babies have been aborted. What was once going to be "safe, rare and legal" is now "abortion on demand." A holocaust of death, bodies stacked in garbage dumps, stored in refrigertors or in jars, liquidated and disposed of in land fill. I've walked through the United States Memorial Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, transfixed by the horrible things done to the Jewish people in World War II. But even then, nearly 58,000,000 people weren't killed. We, in America, are guilty of the worst mass genocide ever perpetrated on Earth!

Don't stop reading yet. This is on my heart because I reread the prescient words of Mother Teresa on the subject of abortion, and I know she is right about what has eventually happened to our hearts over the years as we have hardened them toward the children in our wombs. Yes, children. If we want them, we are having a baby. If we don't, we get rid of tissue...a fetus (look up the word in the dictionary, by the way). 21% of all pregnancies now end in abortion (CDC), over a million are performed in the United States on average every year, 1000 every day. And entire people groups are diminishing because of it. And we wonder over the heart that respects life so little that he would shoot up a classroom. When the mothers of our country embrace the "right to choose to kill their unborn." To take the life of another body within her own. Here's what Mother Teresa said would happen to us with the passage of Roe v Wade:

"We must not be surprised when we hear of murders, of killings, of wars, of hatred. If a mother can kill her own child, what is left but for us to kill each other?"
"America needs no words from me to see how your decision in Roe v Wade has deformed a great nation. The so-called right to abortion has pitted mothers against their children and women against men. It has shown violence and discord at the heart of the most intimate human relationships. It has aggravated the derogation of the father's role in an increasingly fatherless society. It has portrayed the greatest of gifts--a child--as a competitor, an intrusion and an inconvenience. It has nominally accorded mothers unfettered dominion over the independent lives of their physically dependent sons and daughters. And in granting this unconscionable power, it has exposed many women to unjust and selfish demands from their husbands or sexual partners. Human rights are not a privilege conferred by government. They are every human being's entitlement by virtue of humanity. The right to life does not depend, and must not be declared to be contingent upon, the pleasure of anyone else, not even a parent or a sovereign."

Though I respect yesterday's tears shed by the leader of the free world over the children massacred at Sandy Hook, I would pray our President and our nation could begin to wail and mourn over the masses of innocents we slaughter every day in our country. Mr. Obama has praised institutions that perform massive numbers of abortions...blessed them, even...no tears for the millions of children killed, not with guns, but with malice aforethought by their own mothers. On a sterile table with an assisting physician. Roe v Wade was the beginning of the end for us in respecting the most basic elements of human life. I'm sixty-seven. I remember what it was we wanted as women. Why we wanted abortion. The number one reason was so that we could be as sexually free as men. Not having to bear the brunt of a pregnancy, we wanted to participate in "free love." Turns out it costs the lives of millions of innocents. Mother Teresa again: "It is a poverty to decide that a child must die so that you may live as you choose." And so here we are. Throwing into the garbage cans of our metropolises the remains of our most precious gift--a child--so that we don't have to be bothered with the thing. And we wonder why hearts have grown cold, children grown disobedient, ungrateful and heartless.

My heart aches for Sandy Hook parents, too. But where are the tears, Mr. President, for the others whose lives were not celebrated, who were lost in their innocence by the painful and horrific act that tore them from their mothers' bodies? Where are the burials for the children stacked in dumpsters or stored in clinics or vaporized or sold for their parts? When we begin to ache for our lost consciences, repent for our growing selfishness, cry out for the lives of those dying without cause, maybe then we will see the Titanic that is our American culture right itself again.

 

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